Beware the educrats

Saturday

May 3, 2014 at 6:00 AM

The debate over what makes a good teacher has been going on since at least the 5th century B.C., when Socrates held his famous colloquies in Athens. And it may be that centuries of thought, the many rival schools of philosophy and practice, and the myriad varieties of educational experience may not have moved humans all that much closer to a definitive answer.

But we're sure of this much: The answer to teacher training in the United States of America in the 21st century isn't going to come out of Washington, D.C. And we could add this corollary: To the extent that Americans allow the federal government to judge, direct, and ultimately control the training of teachers in this nation, they will come to regret it.

The Obama administration is not the first to have injected the federal government into education, an arena that the Founding Fathers reserved to states and localities. That dubious distinction belongs to President Lyndon B. Johnson, and it was President Jimmy Carter who founded the federal Department of Education, which now consumes more than $70 billion annually.

But this administration has placed federal Race to the Top dollars in play as a lure for states to adopt Common Core curriculum guidelines. And Education Secretary Arne Duncan has now announced that the administration will develop ratings for teacher preparation programs.

Mr. Duncan's claim regarding the nation's 1,400 schools of education — "nobody in this country can tell anybody which one is more effective than the others" — is arguably correct. The best try to date, by the private, nonprofit National Council on Teacher Quality, has met with very limited success, as many schools have either refused to provide information, or given only limited data that does not allow for clear, consistent comparisons.

But it doesn't follow that Uncle Sam is the man for the job.

Handing to government the task of developing clear, simple and comparable metrics for teacher training programs won't improve matters. It is far more likely to simply feed the growth of a federal bureaucracy that takes in tax dollars on one end and spits out rules and regulations at the other.

The disagreement over which method of teacher training is best is real, but one that must be played out at the state and local level. For, both by instinct and under the law, it is at the state and local level that effective programs and reforms must be devised and implemented.

When an effective method is found, states, local school districts, and individuals can and must be free to adopt such a method. When a school succeeds, it should win customers and support.

And it must be remembered that many teachers, from the days of one-room, prairie schoolhouses to today's private and home educators, have achieved remarkable success without ever taking an education training course or enjoying formal certification.

Credentials, certifications, and government rules serve the purposes of bureaucrats. Creating more will cost Americans dearly in time and money, but none confers magic upon individuals who lack the ability to empathize with children and share a love of learning with them.